“THE INTRIGUING THING
ABOUT MOTELS IS ANYTHING
COULD HAPPEN IN THEM:
LOVE, SKULDUGGERY,
CORRUPTION, CRIME.”<<
Indeed, you only need to put a character into
a motel and it tells its own story. The Gold
Coast’s iconic Pink Poodle motel inspired
Australian writer Matthew Condon to write
his 1995 novel, A Night at the Pink Poodle.
“The intriguing thing about motels is anything
could happen in them,” he says. “They could
be for love, skulduggery, corruption, crime,
lost souls trying to disappear from the planet.
Speaking as a writer, they’re extraordinary
devices. There’s a good reason they’re used
repeatedly in film and literature, and that’s
because they’re endlessly mystifying.”
Built in 1967, the motel’s neon signage –
a strutting bright pink dog – quickly became
synonymous with honeymooning and the
Gold Coast’s racy image. “It pointed to an era
of pyjama parties and cabarets,” Condon says.
“If you wanted to get away from everything,
to get away from yourself, you went to the
Gold Coast – this unreal, pseudo-glamorous
landscape where you could forget yourself,
forget your troubles for a week and then
toddle back home.”
After learning that someone in his family
had spent their honeymoon there, Condon
booked in for a night’s stay at the Pink
Poodle before its demolition in 2004. His
experience (one can only hope) was far
less magical than his relatives’. “I can only
describe it as a fleapit,” he says. “Behind the
headboard of the double bed was a weird,
angled mirror that came about 35 degrees
above the top of the bed. It was sad and
tragic to think of all those thousands of
young couples in that room, starting their
married life together.”..........................................
While initially popular, by the 1960s the motel
was already fighting for the right to exist.
In his 1960 book, The Australian Ugliness,
the influential architect and critic Robin
Boyd pulled no punches in his assessment of
motels, describing them as “a blight on any
nascent design culture.” “Boyd labelled them
‘Featurism’,” Reeves explains. “He thought
that style of modernism frivolous. But I
find it interesting that a lot of well-known
architects were sufficiently curious to have
a bash at designing them – Robin Boyd
included. He went on to do a couple of motels,
but true to his word, they were very elegant
modernist buildings rather than the garish
ornamentation of the American style.”According to his biographer, Geoffrey
Serle, Boyd set out to “challenge practically
everything in design that the established
motels stood for.” Graeme Davidson fondly
remembers visiting one of Boyd’s creations,
the Black Dolphin, on his honeymoon.
“The building was harmonious with its
surroundings. It strove to enhance the
relationship between humans and their
environment.” The Heritage Council Victoria
later declared the original Boyd Black
Dolphin design as “the most significant
motel building in Australia.”But heritge-listed motels are few and
far between. For most the only shot at
immortality is a dated medium: the motel
postcard. The best from the U.S. and
Australia are now collectors’ items, and
fetch good money on sites such as eBay.
Looking over his collection, Reeves admits
it’s like getting a dispatch from the Jetsons.
“The postcard perfectly captures the motel’s
golden era, when the architecture was
strange and surreal. Some of them look like
someone’s just done a happy snap, others
have obviously been highly constructed and
art-directed to within an inch of their lives.”The most sought-after postcards often feature
motels with outlandish geometric shapes,
swooping arrows or highly decorative fonts.
There are also a couple of motifs running
through motel postcard art – blue skies and
in-ground pools. “The swimming pool is often
the centrepiece of the motel’s allure,” Reeves
says. “You’ll find cards with people draped
poolside trying to replicate that American
glamour. Sometimes the postcards are used
and have amusing vignettes of people’s
holidays on the back.”But Reeves is interested in more than just
aesthetics and holiday stories. In the age of
cheap air flights and super-highways built to
bypass towns, motel postcards are throwback
to a time when a home away from home could
change your worldview. By making travel easy
and affordable, motels opened up an entire
country to its inhabitants. Put that way, Airbnb
suddenly doesn’t seem so revolutionary. •